5 ms·

> 346 people died because of their ineptitude. This might be too hot of a take for HackerNews, but... look at how many people the FAA has kept safe over the pa

> 346 people died because of their ineptitude. This might be too hot of a take for HackerNews, but... look at how many people the FAA has kept safe over the past 30 years. I'm pretty sure the number of people who travel without dying is very, very high. I don't disagree that their might have been some ineptitude (I'm sure you could find that anywhere for anything since it's opinion driven), but to say the FAA is all rotten because 346 died is kind of dramatic when millions have been kept safe.

lisper 8y ago
The problem is not that this is a big number of deaths in an absolute sense. The problem is that this is a big number of deaths to result from a chain of events that can ultimately be traced back to a strategic decision by Boeing to increase profits, and where an explicit component of that strategy was to cut corners on training. The whole point of MCAS was to avoid the overhead of having to obtain a new type certificate for the new engine design, and that lead to 346 deaths. That's the problem.
- diminoten 8y ago
  All deaths can be traced back to some kind of profit motive, but I don't see you protesting every hospital/doctor on the planet. It's incredibly dangerous to propose changes to the FAA, given how much of an unqualified success they've had over the years at keeping flight safe. Don't let y our populist rage kill probably one of the best/most successful government institutions the US has ever created.
  - lisper 8y ago
    > It's incredibly dangerous to propose changes to the FAA That is an incredibly ironic thing to say, because these deaths are a result of changes to the FAA, specifically, the delegation of the FAA's regulatory authority to the company being regulated. That this would not end well was easily foreseeable because it's such a blatant conflict of interest.
    - diminoten 8y ago
      Literally not true, but okay...
      - cdmckay 8y ago
        Which part isn’t true?
        diminoten 8y ago
        The fact that my comment is ironic...
        lisper 8y ago
        Then you don't understand irony. Which is itself ironic. I was using the word in this sense: "Irony: a literary technique, originally used in Greek tragedy, by which the full significance of a character's words or actions are clear to the audience or reader although unknown to the character."
        diminoten 8y ago
        This isn't a story, and I am not a character. If that's what you were using it like, you are wrong. It'd make at least some sense if you incorrectly meant "irony" in the sense that fucking with the FAA, which I said was bad, is how the MAX was made so poorly. Your fake choice of definition is even worse than what you actually meant.
        lisper 8y ago
        Wow. Not only do you not understand irony, you apparently don't understand literature either. All the world’s indeed a stage And we are merely players Performers and portrayers Each another’s audience Outside the gilded cage
        8y ago
amelius 8y ago
Well, the main argument (which still stands imho) was that the FAA would not be independent in this case.
wtvanhest 8y ago
Was this aircraft even under FAA jurisdiction? I thought the FAA only had jurisdiction over airline flights to and from the US.
- rootusrootus 8y ago
  FAA absolutely has regulatory authority over plane manufacturers in the United States, regardless of where their aircraft are flying.
  - XMPPwocky 8y ago
    Is this written into law, or is it "well, you at least need a ferry certificate for anything built in the US, because what're you going to do, push it onto a barge?"
    - pintxo 8y ago
      Does it matter? We are talking about type approvals here. And this type is also sold in the US.
      - XMPPwocky 8y ago
        My question is "is it illegal to manufacture an airliner in the US without FAA approval, providing it's never actually flown in the US?" It's somewhat abstract, but it's an interesting question to me, which is why I asked. Does the FAA's authority to regulate aircraft construction come from Congress specifically delegating authority over aircraft construction to them- or does the FAA only effectively have the ability to control construction because they can prevent the aircraft from flying in US airspace?
        pintxo 8y ago
        I have no knowledge about the actual process, but can only assume that everyone is allowed to build a plane. But flying it is ~probably~ hopefully the thing that‘s regulated.
sseth 8y ago
I do not see anyone condemning the last 30 years of FAA, just the more recent work. Would it not be appropriate to criticize a significant fall from their earlier high standards? And yes the numbers are not the only relevant issue. It is the manner in which the original certification was done, the failure to act swiftly after the first crash, and the inordinate delay in acting even after the second crash which together seem to paint the picture of an organization which puts the interest of the manufacturer above passenger safety.
TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
Do you mean to argue that Boing and the FAA and / or any other regulatory bodies who approved the 737MAX should get a free pass due to their outstanding work over the past 30 years? That doesn’t sound like an argument anyone would intentionally make. They’ve done good work, great. But these two incidents represent a fall from grace, and both organisations should be pilloried for that incompetence especially because they have a history of high standards.
- acqq 8y ago
  Exactly, it's not about the "blame" is some abstract sense, it's about the process that has to be permanent in order to keep the risk low. Different people already mentioned here a work of MIT Prof. Nancy Leveson http://sunnyday.mit.edu/ http://sunnyday.mit.edu/ An important quote from her book "Engineering a Safer World" section "Questioning the Foundations of Traditional Safety Engineering": "Old Assumption - Major accidents occur from the chance simultaneous occurrence of random events. New Assumption - Systems will tend to migrate toward states of higher risk. Such migration is predictable and can be prevented by appropriate system design or detected during operations using leading indicators of increasing risk." So it's: either the organizations are themselves able to keep the risk from increasing (as quoted, that is even "predictable" and of course it "can be prevented") or there have to be the external influences in that direction. In this case, the organizations themselves failed.
patrickg_zill 8y ago
I believe the saying is "FAA regulations are written in blood" in that new regulation is written after people die from a design defect or other discovered problem in the wake of a crash. Thus there is a discrepancy between your perspective / opinion and the typical way that the NTSB and FAA operate: this is precisely the time to address any issues.
cryptonector 8y ago
All it takes to destroy a great reputation is one massive moral screwup. That's what happened here. And all over a relatively minor technical and economic issue: whether to require additional training. (Also there is the issue that two sensors is not enough redundancy, and using only one of them is a result of that lack of redundancy.)
- petilon 8y ago
  There is more: the airframe of the 737 MAX is not in and of itself stable. Because of the forward positioning of the large engines, the MAX's airframe has a tendency to pitch up when accelerating. Boeing decided to fix this hardware problem with software. This is flawed design. In a multi-layer system, each layer should be intrinsically safe. The job of the higher layers should be to add functionality, not fix flaws in lower layers.
  - mobilefriendly 8y ago
    This is a fundamental point, the entire stack is broken. Fixing the software is just a patch. It is quite possible that in the end, the 737 MAX will be abandoned.
  - tropo 8y ago
    All aircraft with podded engines under low-mounted wings have that tendency to pitch up when accelerating. This is nothing new. The 737 MAX additionally has a tendency to pitch up when pitching up. The more you pitch the aircraft up, the more it wants to pitch up. As you pitch up more and more, you'd like the required force on the controls to increase, but in the 737 MAX it would naturally decrease.
BurningFrog 8y ago
The Monday Morning Quarterback is always the MVP.
msbarnett 8y ago
The FAA has not been an unchanaging entity operating under an unchanging set of rules for the past 30 years. In reality, major changes have been made to the way that the FAA operates and delegates authority in a series of sweeping changes since 2005 that were largely meant to cover for the fact that Congress has been severely underfunding the FAA. The MAX is one of the first models we’ve seen wholly designed and manufactured under this new process. (substantial amounts of the underlying safety analysis of the 787 happened under the old setup) One major change that may be relevant in this case is that whereas Designated Engineering Representatives used to do safety analysis work at Airplane manufactures in a completely parallel, firewalled cross-cutting engineering group that effectively reported directly to the FAA in a quasi on-loan model, “in order to reduce costs” the FAA allowed this to be scrapped and replaced with “Airworthiness Representatives” embedded in, and crucially answering to, the regular engineering management at the company. Company management then acts as middle-man to the FAA. AR Management at say Boeing is nominally supposed to act as independent of Boeing and represent FAA opinions, but in practice routinely pushes back on FAA requests and acts to represent the interests of Boeing management: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/delegating-aircraft-safety-assessments-to-boeing-is-nothing-new-for-the-faa/ https://www.seattletimes.com/business/delegating-aircraft-sa... So previously if day-to-day engineering was under pressure from a manager to ship a software subsystem or complete a component design, these deadlines were unrelated to the DERs, who operated in their own safety-focused management chain under the FAA. Now, the AR is under the same manager and pressures as everyone else to hit the ship date. It is unsurprising that quality of analysis might take a back seat to job security in such a setup. It does not make much sense to defend the FAA by pointing at successes produced by processes that were no longer in place by the time the 737 MAX engineering programme began.
tus87 8y ago
Who said all of FAA is rotten again? Or do you really think straw-men win arguments?
agumonkey 8y ago
perspective is good but it seems they did a superb mistake here, not an average 'subtle systemic error'..
weaksauce 8y ago
I think it was not the FAA's fault but rather the fault of the shrinking budgets and deregulation in parts that offload the safety checks to the manufacturer. blame congress over the past 20 years or so. the greed of boeing to shoehorn the MCAS into the aging airframe is the issue. they didn't want to have to get a new type rating and wanted to prevent needing to retrain pilots.

lisper 8y ago

The problem is not that this is a big number of deaths in an absolute sense. The problem is that this is a big number of deaths to result from a chain of events that can ultimately be traced back to a strategic decision by Boeing to increase profits, and where an explicit component of that strategy was to cut corners on training. The whole point of MCAS was to avoid the overhead of having to obtain a new type certificate for the new engine design, and that lead to 346 deaths. That's the problem.

diminoten 8y ago
All deaths can be traced back to some kind of profit motive, but I don't see you protesting every hospital/doctor on the planet. It's incredibly dangerous to propose changes to the FAA, given how much of an unqualified success they've had over the years at keeping flight safe. Don't let y our populist rage kill probably one of the best/most successful government institutions the US has ever created.
- lisper 8y ago
  > It's incredibly dangerous to propose changes to the FAA That is an incredibly ironic thing to say, because these deaths are a result of changes to the FAA, specifically, the delegation of the FAA's regulatory authority to the company being regulated. That this would not end well was easily foreseeable because it's such a blatant conflict of interest.
  - diminoten 8y ago
    Literally not true, but okay...
    - cdmckay 8y ago
      Which part isn’t true?
      - diminoten 8y ago
        The fact that my comment is ironic...
        lisper 8y ago
        Then you don't understand irony. Which is itself ironic. I was using the word in this sense: "Irony: a literary technique, originally used in Greek tragedy, by which the full significance of a character's words or actions are clear to the audience or reader although unknown to the character."
        diminoten 8y ago
        This isn't a story, and I am not a character. If that's what you were using it like, you are wrong. It'd make at least some sense if you incorrectly meant "irony" in the sense that fucking with the FAA, which I said was bad, is how the MAX was made so poorly. Your fake choice of definition is even worse than what you actually meant.
        lisper 8y ago
        Wow. Not only do you not understand irony, you apparently don't understand literature either. All the world’s indeed a stage And we are merely players Performers and portrayers Each another’s audience Outside the gilded cage
        8y ago

amelius 8y ago

Well, the main argument (which still stands imho) was that the FAA would not be independent in this case.

wtvanhest 8y ago

Was this aircraft even under FAA jurisdiction? I thought the FAA only had jurisdiction over airline flights to and from the US.

rootusrootus 8y ago
FAA absolutely has regulatory authority over plane manufacturers in the United States, regardless of where their aircraft are flying.
- XMPPwocky 8y ago
  Is this written into law, or is it "well, you at least need a ferry certificate for anything built in the US, because what're you going to do, push it onto a barge?"
  - pintxo 8y ago
    Does it matter? We are talking about type approvals here. And this type is also sold in the US.
    - XMPPwocky 8y ago
      My question is "is it illegal to manufacture an airliner in the US without FAA approval, providing it's never actually flown in the US?" It's somewhat abstract, but it's an interesting question to me, which is why I asked. Does the FAA's authority to regulate aircraft construction come from Congress specifically delegating authority over aircraft construction to them- or does the FAA only effectively have the ability to control construction because they can prevent the aircraft from flying in US airspace?
      - pintxo 8y ago
        I have no knowledge about the actual process, but can only assume that everyone is allowed to build a plane. But flying it is ~probably~ hopefully the thing that‘s regulated.

sseth 8y ago

I do not see anyone condemning the last 30 years of FAA, just the more recent work. Would it not be appropriate to criticize a significant fall from their earlier high standards? And yes the numbers are not the only relevant issue. It is the manner in which the original certification was done, the failure to act swiftly after the first crash, and the inordinate delay in acting even after the second crash which together seem to paint the picture of an organization which puts the interest of the manufacturer above passenger safety.

TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago

Do you mean to argue that Boing and the FAA and / or any other regulatory bodies who approved the 737MAX should get a free pass due to their outstanding work over the past 30 years? That doesn’t sound like an argument anyone would intentionally make. They’ve done good work, great. But these two incidents represent a fall from grace, and both organisations should be pilloried for that incompetence especially because they have a history of high standards.

acqq 8y ago
Exactly, it's not about the "blame" is some abstract sense, it's about the process that has to be permanent in order to keep the risk low. Different people already mentioned here a work of MIT Prof. Nancy Leveson http://sunnyday.mit.edu/ http://sunnyday.mit.edu/ An important quote from her book "Engineering a Safer World" section "Questioning the Foundations of Traditional Safety Engineering": "Old Assumption - Major accidents occur from the chance simultaneous occurrence of random events. New Assumption - Systems will tend to migrate toward states of higher risk. Such migration is predictable and can be prevented by appropriate system design or detected during operations using leading indicators of increasing risk." So it's: either the organizations are themselves able to keep the risk from increasing (as quoted, that is even "predictable" and of course it "can be prevented") or there have to be the external influences in that direction. In this case, the organizations themselves failed.

patrickg_zill 8y ago

I believe the saying is "FAA regulations are written in blood" in that new regulation is written after people die from a design defect or other discovered problem in the wake of a crash. Thus there is a discrepancy between your perspective / opinion and the typical way that the NTSB and FAA operate: this is precisely the time to address any issues.

cryptonector 8y ago

All it takes to destroy a great reputation is one massive moral screwup. That's what happened here. And all over a relatively minor technical and economic issue: whether to require additional training. (Also there is the issue that two sensors is not enough redundancy, and using only one of them is a result of that lack of redundancy.)

petilon 8y ago
There is more: the airframe of the 737 MAX is not in and of itself stable. Because of the forward positioning of the large engines, the MAX's airframe has a tendency to pitch up when accelerating. Boeing decided to fix this hardware problem with software. This is flawed design. In a multi-layer system, each layer should be intrinsically safe. The job of the higher layers should be to add functionality, not fix flaws in lower layers.
- mobilefriendly 8y ago
  This is a fundamental point, the entire stack is broken. Fixing the software is just a patch. It is quite possible that in the end, the 737 MAX will be abandoned.
- tropo 8y ago
  All aircraft with podded engines under low-mounted wings have that tendency to pitch up when accelerating. This is nothing new. The 737 MAX additionally has a tendency to pitch up when pitching up. The more you pitch the aircraft up, the more it wants to pitch up. As you pitch up more and more, you'd like the required force on the controls to increase, but in the 737 MAX it would naturally decrease.

BurningFrog 8y ago

The Monday Morning Quarterback is always the MVP.

msbarnett 8y ago

The FAA has not been an unchanaging entity operating under an unchanging set of rules for the past 30 years. In reality, major changes have been made to the way that the FAA operates and delegates authority in a series of sweeping changes since 2005 that were largely meant to cover for the fact that Congress has been severely underfunding the FAA. The MAX is one of the first models we’ve seen wholly designed and manufactured under this new process. (substantial amounts of the underlying safety analysis of the 787 happened under the old setup) One major change that may be relevant in this case is that whereas Designated Engineering Representatives used to do safety analysis work at Airplane manufactures in a completely parallel, firewalled cross-cutting engineering group that effectively reported directly to the FAA in a quasi on-loan model, “in order to reduce costs” the FAA allowed this to be scrapped and replaced with “Airworthiness Representatives” embedded in, and crucially answering to, the regular engineering management at the company. Company management then acts as middle-man to the FAA. AR Management at say Boeing is nominally supposed to act as independent of Boeing and represent FAA opinions, but in practice routinely pushes back on FAA requests and acts to represent the interests of Boeing management: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/delegating-aircraft-safety-assessments-to-boeing-is-nothing-new-for-the-faa/ https://www.seattletimes.com/business/delegating-aircraft-sa... So previously if day-to-day engineering was under pressure from a manager to ship a software subsystem or complete a component design, these deadlines were unrelated to the DERs, who operated in their own safety-focused management chain under the FAA. Now, the AR is under the same manager and pressures as everyone else to hit the ship date. It is unsurprising that quality of analysis might take a back seat to job security in such a setup. It does not make much sense to defend the FAA by pointing at successes produced by processes that were no longer in place by the time the 737 MAX engineering programme began.

tus87 8y ago

Who said all of FAA is rotten again? Or do you really think straw-men win arguments?

agumonkey 8y ago

perspective is good but it seems they did a superb mistake here, not an average 'subtle systemic error'..

weaksauce 8y ago

I think it was not the FAA's fault but rather the fault of the shrinking budgets and deregulation in parts that offload the safety checks to the manufacturer. blame congress over the past 20 years or so. the greed of boeing to shoehorn the MCAS into the aging airframe is the issue. they didn't want to have to get a new type rating and wanted to prevent needing to retrain pilots.